Name: Movie Review: Midsommar
Item: Midsommar
Author: @chekohler

Hey movie lovers

There hasn't been much to capture the attention or rather by attention of late when it comes to pop culture, I had a friend recommend I check out a movie she thought was rather disturbing and I thought, hmm I could go for one of those, any movie that moves you is clearly doing its job.

I decided to watch Midsommar which comes from the twisted mind of Ari Aster, who gave us the creep-fest hereditary. This guy clearly has a thing for cults and rituals because that's exactly what you get in this Eurotrip gone wrong.

What is Midsommar about?

Midsommar centres around the main character Dani who has really been suffering in a cold modern world. She loses her family and is hit especially hard by the suicide of her mentally ill sister and starts to find herself trying to cope with the extreme loss and loneliness with the help of her distance boyfriend.

To give her a break from her current situation the couple travels to Sweden to visit their friend's rural hometown for its fabled midsummer festival, but what begins as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult.

Midsommar

Poster for Midsommar

What I thought of Midsommar

'Midsommar takes a very long time to get to a very predictable and, frankly unsatisfying ending point. It's just so slow and, honestly, can be downright boring at times. While the setting and premise of the movie hold a lot of promise there's nothing all that engaging about the characters we are given to explore this ancient pagan world.

Don't get me wrong the actors do try, its just their motivations and interactions with the situations they are presented with don't really make you feel anything for them in the slightest.

This leads to an aimless vibe, a sense of almost making things up as they go along. This creates some issues when everything starts tying together, especially in terms of overall motivation. I mean, some things in here just aren't believable. Plus there's no actual mystery driving the plot, so there's never any tension or suspense and when there is any it is often brought to a shoddy conclusion.

I will say that there are a few sequences that will leave you shrilling and is properly horrifying, punctuated by gruesome imagery not for the faint of heart, but it stands as the sole example of something that comes close to getting under your skin and, as such, feels sort of out of place, in a way.

The film isn't scary. It's not disturbing, either. Most of the 'horror' just comes from the unfamiliarity of the situation - that being a foreign festival presented as a long-held, normalised tradition - from an outside perspective.

There is no doubt that research was done and this movie is well made, no-one's debating that. One thing that did bug me was its slightly obnoxious, score and makes some distinct visual choices which annoy me because, as I said, it builds up to nothing.

Trailer for Midsommar

My rating for Midsommar

If you're a fan of traditional horror or hack and slash horror films this is not for you. It is slow, methodic and tries to question and compare modern society and our rituals and how we've normalised it and how we've demonised ancient traditions and see them as barbaric even when some of what we do is pretty similar in nature.

There is hardly any jump scares and it's more of a suspense-driven thriller than actual horror. I found that it did drag at times and while it looks great and there is extreme detail in the shots, wardrobe and dialogue it sometimes takes too long to get to their various points the movie tries to make.

If you liked Hereditary you should find this film up your alley. The ending provides a catharsis for the character but is pretty unsatisfying for the viewer.

Pretty sure it will also put a lot of tourists off the idea of visiting Sweden too. I'd have to give it 5 human sacrifices out of 10